SCOTUS decision likely won't change voter purging system in Delaware

Delaware's process of removing voters from registration rolls won't change after Monday's Supreme Court ruling, which opened the door to stricter policies some say infringe on voter rights.

The Court ruled 5-4 that Ohio did not violate federal laws by purging voters who failed to vote for six years and did not confirm their residency — considered the strictest such law in the nation.

The ruling is being touted as a win for Republicans and a defeat for Democrats, who typically thrive during elections with higher voter turnouts.

But election commissioner Elaine Manlove said the state won't be making any immediate changes to its policy, which she says currently follows "the letter of the law" outlined in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, sometimes referred to as the Motor Voter Law.

"I just think it’s a new twist on NVRA, but I think most states and all states have been following it since the beginning," Manlove said.

Delaware currently purges a voter if two pieces of mail are returned as undeliverable combined with the voter missing consecutive general elections.

"Usually after every general election we have a big purge," Manlove said.

Also, every month the state gets a list of deceased residents and eliminate voters almost immediately. She credited the 23-member Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), of which Delaware was an early partner, in improving the state's system. ERIC, a nonprofit, assists states by improving the accuracy of their voter rolls. 

Manlove has in the past dismissed notions that Delaware, a state that as recently as 2014 had tens of thousands of former residents and dead voters bloating its voter rolls, was susceptible to voter fraud.

"I have no concern with voter fraud," she reiterated Monday afternoon.

Justice Samuel Alito pointed out in his majority opinion that one in eight voter registrations in the United States are invalid or inaccurate. 

"It seems that the other party and other places are trying to roll back the clock," said Jesse Chadderdon, Executive Director of the democratic party in Delaware. "It’s a pretty short timeline to decide if someone is an active voter."

"I don’t think it moves us forward," Manlove said.

Chadderdon said the democratic party in Delaware has been talking to voters and targeting voters who didn’t vote in the last few elections and trying to engage them.

The timeline allowed in the ruling gives states the right to take someone off the voter roll if they miss voting in consecutive presidential elections and don't respond to a warning notice.

"It’s sort of a preposterous standard," Chadderdon said.

Alito, in his opinion, said failing to vote cannot be the sole reason for purging voters but noted that Ohio "removes registrants only if they have failed to vote and have failed to respond to a notice."

"A state violates the failure-to-vote clause only if it removes registrants for no reason other than their failure to vote," Alito said. By contrast, he said, Ohio waits six years before removal, following federal law "to the letter."

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said: "This purge program burdens the rights of eligible voters. At best, purged voters are forced to needlessly reregister if they decide to vote in a subsequent election; at worst, they are prevented from voting at all because they never receive information about when and where elections are taking place."

Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, which sued Ohio over the voter purge, said the ruling "threatens the ability of voters to have their voices heard in our elections," according to USA Today.

Ohio has removed thousands of people who don't vote for two years, don't return warning notices, and then don't vote for another four years. The state was sued after the 2015 election, when those who had not voted since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 discovered they no longer were registered. 

The Columbus Dispatch reported in 2015 that Ohio had purged two million names from its voter rolls in the previous five years, with 400,000 of those removals being deceased voters.

Donald Trump carried nearly 52 percent of the vote in Ohio in 2016 and received about 450,000 more votes in the state than Hilary Clinton. Turnout was down slightly in the state, but certainly not enough to make up the difference, as some speculated around the time of the November 2016 election.

In Delaware, about 65 percent of the state's roughly 675,000 voters showed up at polls in November 2016.

Manlove said 17,304 voters were purged after that election, up from 14,656 following the 2012 election.

 (See purging requirements allowed by the NVRA.)

Reporting from USA Today contributed to this story.

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Contact reporter Jeff Neiburg at (302) 983-6772, jneiburg@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @Jeff_Neiburg.